There’s a certain line of thought out there in the political ether. The idea goes something like this. People use their identity to take political action, win offices, pass legislation, steer conversations, or direct movements. Or, to put it more simply, they use identity as political currency.
Now, when people say this, they often speak ominously or conspiratorially. By ‘people’ here, they have in mind members of marginalized groups. They think those sorts of people (i.e., others) use their identity as political currency. That’s something we should keep at the back of our minds, because people (and here I mean ‘white people, usually white men’) tend to overlook cases where members of their own group do things like this.
So…what is it to use identity as political currency? How’s it done? Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or both/neither?
Political Currency
I’m thinking about political currency pretty broadly here. But mostly what I have in mind is political capital. That term refers to the building of resources or power within political contexts (e.g., the resources or power needed to do things while holding political office, among other examples).
As an intro to these things, the wikipedia article I linked in the last paragraph does the job well enough. But people love drawing distinctions. Especially me. You don’t make it through a Philosophy PhD program without loving distinctions. What kind of distinctions? Often in these conversations, distinctions among sources of political currency. Let’s say, among others, one’s reputation versus one’s record in office.
But you don’t often see identity listed as a source. At least not directly. Perhaps identity lurks behind some discussions about a politician’s reputation. Or perhaps even their political experiences. But I want to look at it directly. How is identity a more direct source of political currency?
Six Ways People Use Identity as Political Currency
How do people use identity as political currency? I’ve charted out six ways. Are they exhaustive? Probably not. But they’re things I’ve noticed and find interesting. I think they’re a good starting point.
Before I get to the six ways, I want to reiterate the point I made at the outset. Lots of Americans, mostly white Americans, start from the premise that ‘identity’ issues apply only to members of marginalized groups. But let’s cut the shit. That isn’t true. Even identity politics in the US started as a defense of white identity. Plenty of others point this out. I wrote earlier on the book Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider, who makes the point clearly.
And the point applies well to using identity as political currency. Members of many identity groups do it, but whites did it first and in the worst ways. I’ll organize this post accordingly, from methods used most often by white men to methods used most often by members of other groups.
1. Asserting White Male Privilege
And so, here’s where we start. White guys using their white male identity as political currency to gain the short-term benefits of white male privilege. How does this happen? Whiteness and maleness open doors for lots of white guys. Even for white guys who aren’t otherwise qualified or who’d never be taken seriously if they weren’t white guys. Donald Trump is the recent and loudest example.
But, also, someone mention the Pete Buttigieg presidential campaign? Oh, and where’s Beto?
I won’t say much else about this one, because I hope my readers already know a bit about white male privilege. The reason I’m writing about it now is that many of you might not think about white maleness as political currency. You should.
2. Conflating Race with Socioeconomic Status (SES)
We know lots of Americans use race as a proxy for SES (e.g., income, wealth, or education, as opposed to class). And that they do so to their own advantage, or at least their own short-term and/or perceived advantage. On some conceptions of white privilege, to provide whites with the ‘wages of whiteness’ is, in fact, its primary function. Some whites thus degrade non-whites – particularly black Americans – as poor to provide themselves with a mental boost. Applied by others, rather than self-applied, this conflation may lead to more obvious material benefits, e.g., jobs, school admissions, et al.
3. Pinkwashing, et al.
Party leaders are losing their grip on the nomination process. And actual voters are taking it away from them! Maybe even as recently as 5-10 years ago, it was ‘the party decides‘. But now, perhaps not so much. On the GOP side, Donald Trump won over the objections of…just about every party leader. Thus far, Democrats have kept a lid on it. How? One method: satisfying the left-most voters by pretending someone’s identity makes them more ‘progressive’. Thus, they assuage the base without impacting policy.
We saw a bit of this with Barack Obama in 2008. But it really burst out into the open with the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign. Bernie Sanders and his supporters called Clinton the establishment candidate. Clinton and her supporters responded in many cases by pointing to her gender. The problem? The Clintonista response was a non-sequitur.
In the 2020 cycle, Pete Buttigieg presents an even more striking example. He’s one of the most conservative Democrats in the race, and I’ve argued he might be the worst candidate. However, many progressives like Buttigieg. Why? For one, he’s gay. His identity lends the appearance of bona fides without the fact of it. Of course, his identity isn’t the whole story. His apparent intelligence, along with a healthy dose of white male privilege, plays a role. But his sexual orientation does work here.
There’s at least tentative empirical evidence this strategy works. How? By playing on implicit biases of voters. There’s evidence that voters, when asked to identify the ideology of politicians, move politicians to the left merely for being a member of a marginalized group.
4. Excusing Bad Politicians
And then there’s the flip side of #3: when even supporters admit certain Democrats aren’t very good, but assert they would be good if only some state of affairs obtained. In this case, the state of affairs is the end of sexism/racism/et al. That is to say that certain Democrats would be more progressive if only voter prejudices (or GOP sexism or racism) weren’t holding them back. It’s these forces turning them into ‘establishment’ candidates.
Supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are notorious for doing this. Sometimes one just can’t ignore Obama or Clinton centrism. It’s too obvious to deny. And so, they justify centrism by pretending it’s not a product of the real Obama or Clinton, only the Obama or Clinton that racism or sexism generates. Sometimes Democrats pepper a bit of this into a broader narrative aligning more closely with #3 above. Rebecca Traister played it this way in New York magazine. At other times they use it in the context of concern trolling Obama or Clinton rivals (in this particular case, the author of said concern trolling, Jessica Valenti, reportedly did it after consulting with the Clinton campaign). But we can discern the basic move in many contexts.
5. De-legitimizing Dissent
Here’s where we have more of a break. The first two ways of using identity as political currency are practiced mostly by straight white men, and the second two are practiced by a wide range of people. But these final two ways are mostly in the realm of members of marginalized groups.
Sometimes people use their marginalized identity as a shield to batter others. In some cases, it’s just explicit physical abuse. And so, we have cases where people justify physical violence against their partner because they’re ‘more oppressed’ than their partner. If we think about it for even a second, these cases ought to be clear enough and easy to condemn.
But I think there are more difficult, more common, and therefore probably more pernicious cases. For example, cases where people use identity language to influence, manipulate, or gerrymander conversations in such a way that opponents simply can’t be taken seriously. Or that opponents are desirable, wrong, or oppressive simply by definition because of who they are.
It’s tough to recognize this. But when you push at a case, typically the argument reduces to something like: “I’m a member of [Group X] or have gone through [Experience Y], and therefore if you disagree with [a claim that the person attributes to their identity or experience, but is actually a factual claim that’s true or false independently from one person’s identity or experience], you’re [a rape apologist, an awful person, oppressive, etc.].”
As a philosopher, I find these cases particularly frustrating because they’re almost always informal logical fallacies of one kind or another. And people employ these fallacies to shut down important discussion.
6. Exploiting White Liberal Guilt
And now for a contrast. I take this one much more light-heartedly. What I have in mind here is things like corporate diversity seminars, workshops or lectures at businesses, diversity Ted Talks, et al. Due to various facts about corporate politics, members of marginalized groups give these lectures to almost always white, sometimes male audiences. But what happens here is that trainers, lecturers, etc. charge money that people pay due to white liberal guilt.
Do these seminars accomplish anything? Probably not much. Are they kind of a low-level scam to transfer money from businesses to diversity consultants and lecturers? Sometimes. But why should I get upset about that? If companies or wealthy people want to spend their money on these events, I suppose we should let them. And if a few members of marginalized groups benefit from the wealth transfer, I guess that’s good.
Let’s just not assign more political merit to these events than they warrant. And, really, it’s unclear whether this is a matter of using identity as political currency at all. That is to say, the political currency element is sometimes absent, replaced more directly by monetary currency.
What Do These Things Have in Common?
Way back when I founded this blog, I distinguished between identitarianism and identity politics. Where might this post stand in relation to that post?
I guess it’s complicated. If you look at the list above, these actions are often rather individualistic. When people do these things, they benefit themselves first, and their groups only second, if at all. And so, I wouldn’t really put any of this stuff in the ‘identity politics’ box. If it’s in any box, it’s in the identitarian one.
Consequently, I might finish with a contrast. Let’s talk about the example of call-out culture. In its original form, the call-out was an emergency actions to prevent online abuse. That’s it. On its own, and in this form, it wasn’t about political currency at all. Nor was it really even about gaining anything for anyone. Just stopping abuse.
Paired with an educational program and/or broader movement, we might use the call-out as a part of a worthwhile program of identity politics. And embedded in a broader left-wing movement, it might be part of something much more ambitious. None of this involves using identity as political currency. At least nothing like what I catalog above.
